Apr 02, 2024 21:00:00

How do game voice actors deal with AI that steals their voices?

The relationship between work and AI is rapidly changing, with

robocalls of President Joe Biden's AI-generated voice becoming a social issue and Hollywood actors and screenwriters going on strike to demand regulation of AI. British news media The Guardian interviewed how game voice actors who are in an unstable position are trying to deal with AI issues.

'It's very easy to steal someone's voice': how AI is affecting video game actors | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/29/how-ai-is-affecting-video-game-actors

'It's easy to steal someone's voice. It used to take six hours in 2022, three hours in 2023, but now it takes three seconds. Now anyone can do it on Instagram or 'You can create a digital copy of a person's voice from a TikTok or YouTube video. The quality is still not perfect, but the technology is constantly improving.'

Cissy Jones is a voice actor who has worked on about 300 games so far, including ``Gate III''.

After discovering that his own voice had been uploaded without his permission, and that his contract had secretly included a 'permission to reproduce his voice,' Mr. Jones collaborated with his colleagues to develop a plan for the coexistence of voice actors and AI. I have launched a startup called Morpheme.

Morpheme, where Mr. Jones is a director, uses a business model that creates digital copies of voice actors with their consent and pays them each time they are used in a game or anime. Additionally, if a voice actor wishes to stop providing a digital copy, they can do so at any time.

Unlike film and television voice actors who may receive additional compensation from rebroadcasts, game voice actors generally do not receive any income after recording. Therefore, some game voice actors are seeing AI technology like Morpheme, which allows them to earn money by having digital copies do voice work, as a new opportunity.

Andy McGee , a Canadian voice actor, has created a voice dataset that allows him to speak anything within the guidelines by injecting 7,000 words of voice with various emotions. I'm not going to tell you that this is an exciting new technology, but I'm also not going to tell you that it's a nightmare for the voice acting industry, because I personally think it's a win-win for new game developers. I have worked on recording voices for AI, but there is a problem in this industry of getting consent from voice actors, and since it is a new technology, the rules are slow to be established, so there are still rules. They are probably still trying to figure out what to do and what is okay to do and what is wrong.'

On the other hand, some voice actors fear that if developers in the highly competitive game industry dabble in AI, they will lose their jobs or have their work devalued. In particular, games that feature a large number of characters or fully voiced games that have interactive options for dialogue scenes require a huge number of lines, so the industry's interest in AI technology that can create character voices from text is increasing. .

Jared Butler, who played the role of Jack Sparrow in ``Pirates of the Caribbean'' in works such as ``Kingdom Hearts III,'' said, ``There is no voice actor who isn't worried about his future career, and I don't want to be affected by negative influences.'' There is no version of AI that does not.'

Mr. Butler, who is said to be Johnny Depp's official 'voice look-alike,' specializes in voice imitation, but he is concerned that many voice actors will be replaced by AI due to the rise of AI, and there are already many voice actors. He has seen voice actors being replaced by AI.

'Most people think of AI voices as some kind of crappy voice-enabled robot, but that's not the case,' said Butler. Even as someone who has been there for a long time, I have to say that the precision of this technology is terrifying.'

In 2023, the Screen Actors Guild and American Television and Radio Writers Federation (SAG-AFTRA), a union that includes 2,600 actors involved in game production, including voice actors and motion actors, will They overwhelmingly voted to go on strike against 10 game studios.

SAG-AFTRA may go on strike anytime soon, but negotiations with the industry are also underway. Chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said: ``A key focus of the negotiations is to ensure that performers whose performances, images, voices and bodies are replicated through AI technology have informed consent for such applications.'' If this were realized, fair compensation would naturally be prescribed. Generative AI, an AI tool that can create the performance of a non-existent person, would completely eliminate the role of humans in the creative process. Appropriate guardrails are needed to ensure that people are not excluded.'